


Neighbours From Hell

by weytani



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: (guess who), Alternate Universe - Neighbors, F/F, things that go bump in the night - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24512524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weytani/pseuds/weytani
Summary: Shaw moves into a run-down apartment block, and things aren't quite what they seem.
Relationships: Root/Sameen Shaw
Comments: 9
Kudos: 87





	Neighbours From Hell

**Author's Note:**

> have been sitting on this for a bit, figured i may as well post it for anyone like me who can't let this show go. warning for failed blood rituals and mentions of gruesome death. not in detail & not the otp, just kind of. there! if that's a no-no for you.

Shaw’s new neighbour is a fucking vampire.

Nocturnal is what she means. It starts from the day Shaw moves in, lifting stacked boxes up a narrow stairwell to the one-room shack of an apartment she’s renting while she pays her way through med school. From day one, when the sun goes down and Shaw’s crashed out in bed and trying to catch some sleep before her first shift—

That music starts playing. Like garage band meets electronica club crap meets two cats scrapping and howling in the alley. It’s on full blast, bouncing off the walls, and Shaw can feel the floor vibrating against her bare feet when she throws her legs over the side of the mattress to stand up.

Five straight days have passed now, and she’s yet to see this person who’s keeping her up at night. Nobody in the building has a crumb of social skills between them, but at least she’s bumped into a couple of the meth-heads and hard-ass single moms in the hallway, even between marathon study sessions and her current rotation. A couple of times she’s been so wrecked the music’s barely bothered her, dead to the world as soon as her head hits the pillow.

But today…

Shaw throws her front door open and the noise is even louder in the hall. Nobody’s around, but the automatic lights flicker on with her movement; some of them, anyway, and the rest probably haven’t been swapped out in Shaw’s lifetime.

She turns to face the door of her neighbour, with its rusted number plate and the ugly purple welcome mat dropped haphazardly in front, and slams her fist down against the wood once, twice, and then a few dozen more times for effect. The music keeps blaring.

If anything, it seems to get louder, and Shaw’s about a half-second away from going back for her steel-toed boots and kicking the door in herself when the sound cuts out. A moment later, Shaw hears the lock click.

“Can I help you?”

The woman in the doorway isn’t quite what Shaw had been expecting. She’d pictured a coked-up white guy in a greasy tanktop. And what her neighbour actually looks like is… well.

Long brown curls of hair sway delicately around pale shoulders, framing big doe-eyes in a face that sure as hell doesn’t belong in a place like this. She’s got a v-neck t-shirt on, purple like her ugly-ass mat, and black skinny-jeans that make her legs look pretty damn amazing.

Okay, Shaw thinks, taking in the full picture. Who the fuck is this?

“It’s three in the morning,” she says, because there’s not much else that needs saying.

“Is it?” The woman pulls out a slim, black phone from her back pocket, eyes wide and innocent. “A-ha.”

A-ha.

“You going to turn that junk off now, or is this going to become a problem?”

The woman blinks idly, head tilted to the side like Shaw’s just asked a question worth contemplating. Her eyes flick from Shaw’s face to her neck, and meander down the tanktop she’d thrown on for bed a few hours ago. It’s not subtle, the way her mouth twitches into a wry smirk, and Shaw is fully aware she’s being checked out by this perv.

“You’re new here, right?”

“Next door,” Shaw responds flatly. “Walls are thin, you know.”

“Sorry.” It sounds genuine enough, but the woman’s mouth twists into a theatrical pout that throws the whole thing into question. “I can’t really tell from my side, actually. You’re so quiet over there.”

“I come back here to sleep; anything else I can do somewhere that doesn’t smell like rat crap.”

The pout creases down into a grin, and Shaw crosses her arms, ready to end the dragging conversation now that she’s made her point. Whether it’s taken into consideration by this nuisance is another story, but at least Shaw knows she could take her in a fight if it got that far.

“Keep it down, or I’m calling the cops.”

With that, she turns on her heel and takes a long stride down the hall. Mid-step, a hand grabs at her bicep, long fingers squeezing tight until Shaw snatches her arm away and pins her touchy neighbour with a furious glare.

“Do I look like a member of your frou-frou book club? Hands off.”

“Since you’re already up, why not keep me company for a while? Quick caffeine fix to start your day right.”

Shaw looks up at her, stony-faced, across the short distance between them. Her neighbour has now followed her out into the hallway wearing black socks decorated with neon green 1s and 0s lined up from ankle to toe. Still, Shaw considers her options: catch an hour or two of sleep or push on with the day, and maybe tear into the wiring for this nerd’s speakers while she’s making coffee.

“Come on, message received. Let me make it up to you,” the woman says coaxingly, and leans to one side of the doorframe. Shaw can see past her into the dark apartment now, at the fairy lights strung up in a line where the wall meets the ceiling, glowing faintly, and further down to where a lava lamp bobs blue and purple on a shelf where the hall turns a corner. Stoner college student dorm or serial killer chic, it’s hard to tell.

“No soy milk, no sugar. And I want you to know,” Shaw steps forward, head angled in a way that most people find intimidating. “I don’t like to be touched.”

Her neighbour throws both hands up lazily, as if in surrender, and turns with a sly grin to lead Shaw into the apartment. With the door shut behind her, Shaw picks up the smell of incense burning, and underneath that a hint of… copper?

“Do you live alone?” Shaw asks pointedly. This woman has taken a good long look down her shirt, so a partner seems unlikely, but maybe a roommate. Or an accomplice cutting up body parts in the bathtub.

“Just me here. Too bad the landlord won’t allow pets. I’ve always been a cat person.” She says this with a sidelong look at Shaw, eyebrows lifting meaningfully.

Shaw rolls her eyes, but follows her around the corner, and then through an open doorway into a living room with a kitchenette against the far wall. There’s an island separating it from the rest of the room, with stools tucked underneath and a laptop open on top, flashing a grid of black leather jackets on some shopping page.

Looks like someone has expensive taste.

At least the lights are on in here, so it feels a little less eerie, but Shaw finds the jumble of cartoonish fridge magnets and furry throw pillows tackier than the stupid ass lava lamp in the hallway. But then, she herself still has an assortment of crap left over from the previous tenant; a battered set of drawers with some cool graffiti scraped in with what was probably a pen-knife and, for whatever reason, a wooden easel functioning purely as a clothes horse these days.

Her neighbour crosses the room and shuts the laptop with one hand on her way by, before rifling through cupboards like she’s got no idea where she keeps her coffee. Shaw parks up on one of the stools and watches the back of her head while she searches.

“If you don’t have it, just say so,” Shaw mutters.

The other woman tosses her hair as she turns her head to meet Shaw’s flat gaze. “Trust me,” she says cheerfully, and slaps a jar of ground coffee beans down onto the counter, “I have it.”

For the next five minutes, Shaw watches quietly while her neighbour boils a kettle over the stove and prepares two mugs of hot coffee, black, with nothing artificial or otherwise disgusting.

It’s not that she’s worried this woman’s going to slip her something, mostly because she doesn’t worry about anything particularly. Shaw can see she’s got some muscle under those deceptively skinny arms, but it’s three in the morning; no time to lug a body down two flights of stairs, across the city, try to dump it in the river. Shaw’s young and healthy, and likely to be missed if she doesn’t show up to class.

You’d have to be an idiot to take those odds and, despite the kitschy taste in interior design, this one has a sharp look in her eyes. Shaw finds it kind of hot, actually.

“So,” Hot Neighbour starts, sliding a mug across the island towards Shaw and taking a sip from the other one, eyes closed for a long moment as if inhaling the caffeine like a dying man in the desert. And then she beams those big doe eyes at Shaw again. “What’s your name?”

Shaw considers ignoring the question. It’s always a lead into further small-talk, and she’s not good at that kind of thing. “Sameen,” she says after a pause. No last name, just to keep that measure of distance.

She eyes the coffee for a while, fingers toying at the handle. The polite thing would probably be to ask the same question back, and then follow the yellow brick road to conversation. What do you do for a living? What’s your star sign? Are you a serial killer?

“It’s cold in here.”

That makes her laugh, for some reason. “Aren’t you going to ask me my name?”

“What’s your name?” Shaw parrots, a wry smile on her face. She tilts her head and leans forward in mock interest, and then slumps back abruptly. It’s too early, she can’t even fake it right now.

“Cute, but I think I’ll tell you anyway. Call me Root.”

“Root,” Shaw says, testing it out. Not a common name for a white woman in her late twenties, or maybe early thirties. She takes a slow pull of the coffee, holding eye contact over the lip of the cup, and Root smiles back with her head tilted to one side.

“I saw you moving in last weekend. Wanted to say hi, but I was a little preoccupied.”

“Lucky me,” Shaw drawls. She sets the cup down, rolling her eyes up and around the room to avoid any more prolonged eye contact. Root’s laptop has gone into standby on the counter beside them, black screen reflecting Shaw’s own neutral expression back like a dull mirror. And behind her, a pair of eyes glint from the open doorway into the hall.

Shaw blinks slowly, fingers tensing just a little around ceramic. Throw the coffee, shatter the cup, throat, eyes, groin—and then what?

Her head snaps to the left, but there’s nobody else in the room.

Studies show that sleep deprivation can induce hallucinations in some cases. Or maybe Root’s fairy lights are so offensive to Shaw’s eyes that her brain is casting shapes as if to physically fight them.

“Something wrong?” Root asks innocently, leaning over the island to follow Shaw’s eyeline.

“No,” Shaw says. And then, “You’re sure nobody else is around?”

“Well, there’s a jumpy little firecracker drinking coffee in my kitchen, and then the Zodiac Killer hiding in my coat closet, of course.”

Nobody’s ever accused Shaw of being _jumpy_ before, and she doesn’t like the taste of it. Careful, that’s what she is; prepared, because they live in a cash-only rental above a skeevy all-hours strip club.

Root talks aimlessly for a while after that, observations about current events, the advancement of technology, and, more often than not, just probing questions for Shaw to brush off or outright refuse to answer. How long she’s planning to stay in the area, what kind of music she likes, whether she has any social media profiles. She doesn’t, and Root looks put-out by that fact. Shaw gets the impression she’s in for the full works of internet stalking if Root ever gets a hold of her last name. Too bad Shaw had an acquaintance – friend, Cole would call himself – purge any mention of her name from all active web search engines after graduating high school. No way she’s getting looked up in ten years by those slackers from back home.

It’s a pretty one-sided conversation, but in all that time Root doesn’t say much in particular about herself, or even what she actually does all day besides wait for the sun to set so she can poison the night with her shrill, grating music. Every now and then, Shaw finds herself glancing back at the reflection in the laptop screen, and every time it’s just her own bored face looking back.

Amber light starts to leak in from behind the dark shutters over the window, and Shaw pushes away from the counter after a last swig of lukewarm coffee. She feels more awake now, at least, even if she hasn’t spotted the source of that noise. Must have been a wireless speaker in the bedroom, and she figures Root would get the wrong idea if she started heading that way.

“Got somewhere to be?” Root asks, as Shaw moves for the door.

“Coffee’s cold,” Shaw says brusquely.

“I could make some more.”

She follows Shaw out into the hallway of her apartment, trailing her like a stray. But Root has none of the appeal that would lure her back across the street to pet a cute dog on the way home. Or at least, and Shaw will admit it, not _that_ particular kind of appeal. She’d taken a measured look at Root’s ass while she was making coffee.

“Look, just keep it down, like I said. And, uh…” Shaw trails off when a cold palm sweeps up along the side of her neck. She draws her shoulders up and pivots on her heel, ready to grab a handful of Root’s shirt for getting handsy after the warning from earlier.

But Root is three steps away in her own gait, much more than an arm’s length, and she wouldn’t have had time to move back fast enough for that to make sense. Shaw squints, uncertain, and Root stops a foot away, bracing her hands casually on the walls at either side of them.

“And… nobody gets hurt?” Root ventures, sounding amused again.

“And nobody gets my foot through their wall at three in the morning.”

The stink of incense, or maybe perfume, gets stronger as Shaw passes a closed door on their right. She takes smaller steps as they go by, peering sidelong while trying not to turn her head in a conspicuous show of interest.

Shaw hadn’t noticed it on her way in, and it occurs to her that this is the same spot where she’d been throat-punched by the smell of copper earlier.

“Scented candles,” Root says from behind her, clearly picking up on what Shaw was trying not to project. “I was running a bath.”

And immediately, Shaw hears the plink of water on the other side of the door, like fat droplets hitting the surface of a full tub. The timing is convenient, but more than anything else Shaw just doesn’t care. It’s almost four, and she wants a shower of her own.

So she doesn’t comment on the fact that Root’s been shooting her mouth off for thirty minutes, all while her bath water’s probably cooled to an unpleasant temperature. Doesn’t ask why she’s even taking a bath in the middle of the night. Sometimes people just do things for their own nonsensical reasons, that’s what Shaw has learned.

“Thanks,” she says as an afterthought, as she walks out of Root’s apartment. Now that she’s a little more awake, she’s willing to put the bare minimum of effort into social cues.

Root just smiles at her from the dark interior, hand grasped loosely around the door as she holds it open. “Let’s do this again soon,” she says cheerfully, and then the door slams shut.

-

Shaw’s collecting her mail from the row of boxes mounted by the front entrance when the weird kid from downstairs tries to talk to her.

This happens from time to time, and maybe Shaw’s exuding some kind of vibe without meaning to because she’s sure as hell not initiating anything. But the kid’s been creeping up on her since she moved in, always catching her on the stairs or hovering near the mailboxes to ambush her like they’re good friends.

“Hi, Number Five,” she says, greeting Shaw by the apartment number plate on her mailbox. Shaw doesn’t give her name out freely. Except, she supposes, to hot nerds with big doe-eyes.

“Not today.” She pushes the metal slat back into place, flicking through letters and refusing to give Gen her attention.

“You got up early this morning,” Gen says, and then, as if to improve on this strange non-sequitur, “I heard you with your friend in the hallway.”

“You always slink around in the stairwell at night?” Shaw asks her, finally making eye contact to fully express how unimpressed she is. “Keep doing that and you’ll be on the back of a milk carton before you turn twelve.”

“It’s 2020,” Gen says with disdain. “They don’t put people on milk anymore. And no, the loud music woke me up. _Again_.”

It hadn’t really occurred to Shaw that every living thing in the building could probably hear Root’s twisted symphony in the early hours. More surprising is that nobody else has put a stop to it before she’d gone over herself. But then, she and Gen – plus Gen’s useless drunk of a cousin – are the only ones sharing walls with her, right in the firing line.

“You and me both, kid,” Shaw murmurs. Nothing but junk mail in her box today too, so this conversation had been another pointless exercise. “Later.”

“Is she staying with Carlos?” The question follows her down the corridor, and Shaw glances back at Gen with one foot on the stairs.

“Who?”

Gen rolls her eyes like this is a ridiculous question, and tails her up to the first floor. “You know, Carlos, from number six, with all the music. He’s never had a woman over before, not since I started living here, so like a couple of years. He’s pretty old and gross too, so I guess he doesn’t care about the noise much. Did you see him when you were talking? Are they dating or is he, like, her uncle?”

“No,” Shaw responds, and doesn’t offer up any juicy details so Gen quickly loses interest and wanders off. But Shaw’s still thinking about that conversation when she’s back in her own apartment, pulling the tab on a cold beer can with her shoes kicked off into the corner.

Root had said, point blank, that she lived alone. “Just me here,” in that sweet as sugar voice, and Shaw’s usually pretty good at spotting the body language of a bare-faced liar. She’d clocked Root as a weirdo from the second minute, but a lot of the absurdity going on around that whole interaction had been quickly chalked down to lack of sleep, and to that strange liminal time just before dawn.

Still, Root could be couch-surfing, or a squatter, or just into gross old men (Gen’s words). Maybe Carlos was dosed on Ambien and passed out in the bedroom, out of sight and too out of it to hear a damn thing, which would explain the music too. People lie for all kinds of reasons.

And to Root’s credit, Shaw sleeps through the night without hearing a peep.

-

This peace lasts for all of two days, and comes grinding to a halt when Shaw wakes, bleary-eyed, at Fuck Off o’clock on a Saturday morning.

When Shaw rolls sideways over the bed to grab her phone, she realises it’s even earlier than usual. The clatter of Root’s music is like a hammer beating at the side of her head, and she grits her teeth against the assault. It takes her far too long to stumble around in the dark looking for a clean pair of pants, and her hair is half yanked out of its ponytail when she throws the front door open.

Shaw’s going to waterboard this bitch if she’s running a bath again.

But when she pounds on the door to apartment six, the wood recedes under her fist and swings back on its hinge, as if it had been left on the latch.

Shaw stares into the dark hallway before her, pooled in black without the fairy lights from last time, and without the lava lamp anywhere in sight. Nothing but empty space and music blaring from the depths.

“Root.” She raises her voice, trying to cut through the noise, but her throat’s still dry from sleep and she’s never really been a shouter. Either way, she could hardly compete with the racket being released from inside that apartment.

Instead, Shaw puts her hand on the door and walks in, holding it open so she can see by the dim light in the outside hallway. There’s a thin strip of light under the door to her left, a few feet ahead, where Root had indicated the bathroom to be. And she can smell it again, the copper and the incense. As she moves closer, she’s forced to let the front door swing shut behind her, and she’s left with just that rectangle of light to guide her feet. The music gets louder with every step.

It’s possible she’s about to walk in on Root ass-naked in the tub, but Shaw doesn’t care. She’s unfazed by nudity, has to be if she’s ever going to be a doctor, so if anyone’s going to be embarrassed it’ll be Root, and she’ll deserve every humiliating second of it. And then, in an ideal world, she’ll die by electric shock when Shaw punts her speakers into the water.

With that satisfying, if unrealistic, image in mind, Shaw reaches out and turns the handle, pushing forward into the room.

As it turns out, Root really was lying about the bath. But not so much about the candles, though they’re not the knock-off scented Yankee candles from Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

No, Root’s bathroom – which, and here’s the thing, isn’t anything resembling a bathroom, but is in fact a wide, square, empty room with a giant wall-to-wall pentagram carved into the wooden floor – is lined all around with white tapered candles, dripping wax in streams and lighting up the figure sat facing the circle on the other side.

“Hi, Neighbour,” Root says, grinning impishly up at her with one arm draped lazily over a bent knee.

Shaw stares, and doesn’t speak, and stares a little more, not just at Root but at the criss-cross of scratch marks at the centre of the pentagram, and at the parts of the floor that look darker than the rest, as if something has pooled there and dried into the wood.

She takes this all in with one long, measured stare, and then turns to exit the room. When in doubt, Cole used to say, just nope the fuck out.

One second she’s reaching for the handle, the next there’s a pale hand shooting over her shoulder and pushing the door shut in her face. Shaw glares at the row of neat black fingernails, and follows the arm back around to its owner, rotating on her heel gracefully.

“Don’t care. About any of this. Move or I’ll break your arm.” She says it all in a flat, unaffected voice, looking not into Root’s eyes, but at the cruel smirk pulling at her lips. Her teeth are sharper than Shaw remembers, maybe. She’s wearing some kind of matte lipstick.

“Is the music too loud?” Root asks innocently, leaning down and forward, stopping a few inches from Shaw’s face when she doesn’t flinch away.

There’s no music, really, never had been. That unholy din, the screaming and the vibrations, are all pulsing out of that circle in the floor. But quieter since Shaw walked in, and since Root moved away to pin her to the door.

“So, what, you’re some kind of Satanist?” Shaw glances from one eye to the other, taking in the bright red colour of her irises. Yeah, she’d definitely looked a lot more normal the last time Shaw was here.

“I mean,” Root pauses, seeming to think about it from the way her nose wrinkles. “In a manner of speaking. But not quite.”

Shaw’s not in the mood to try to parse meaning from that, nor does she feel like talking with Root’s face taking up the vast majority of her eyeline. She raises both hands and shoves Root away by the shoulders, and Root absorbs the blow with a single step back, grinning.

“No need to be so rough, Sameen, I just want you to hear me out.”

“I hear you. The kid downstairs hears you. It’s 1am, you woke me up, and, uh, yeah, you’re trying to summon the devil? I’ve heard plenty.”

“That’s not—” Root cuts herself off, and when Shaw tries to leave this time, she doesn’t stop her. But she does follow her out of the room, only to side-step her, moving ridiculously fast, to press her back to the front door so Shaw can’t get through.

“Move.”

“I’m not trying to _summon_ anything,” Root says, and Shaw scowls at her attempt to backtrack on this freak show. “Aren’t you wondering what happened to Carlos?”

“Ritual sacrifice?” It’s a little funny that she wasn’t far off the first time. Body parts in the bathtub. Minus the bathtub.

“He lived alone, that’s what she told you, right?”

Shaw’s starting to wonder how everybody else seems to know who she’s talking to and where, like she’s living in some kind of hidden camera reality tv show. Like someone’s going to jump out and tell her she just got Punk’d. Then she’ll really have to break something.

“So where do you think I came from?”

“Craigslist, at a guess. Is there a Tinder for devil worshippers?”

But no, Root’s got a serious look on her face now as she steps away from the door and puts her hands on Shaw’s shoulders, and then, very sternly, tells her that old Carlos cut his wrist open over the pentagram, and summoned her bony ass from the seventh circle of Hell.

Shaw would laugh, or at least snicker a bit, but then Root has to go and reach down the back of her pants, pulling out what looks to be a very long, very scaly looking tail that coils around her hand like the body of a thin snake, the jagged point of it hanging in the air between them.

After that, Shaw lets Root pull her by the hand to the kitchen for more coffee.

-

“So, you’re saying,” Shaw says, and pinches the bridge of her nose as she tries to line the words up in a way that makes sense. “He brought you here, for whatever reason, and now you’re… stuck.”

Root paces from one side of the room to the other with her arms crossed, tail now free to unfurl at her back and sway from side to side as she moves. Shaw watches it for a while as she leans on the counter, but snaps her eyes away when Root glances over. She’s not embarrassed, it’s a tail for God’s sake, but Root’s picked up a bad habit of running her hand over it real slow when she catches Shaw looking.

“Our friend Carlos, while talented enough to read my book and follow steps 1 through 9, was not a dab hand at the blood ritual.” Root mimes stabbing a knife into her wrist, but violently like a hammer hitting a nail, and Shaw gives her a mock appalled look.

“So where is he now?”

“Poor guy,” she says, without an ounce of real sympathy, “fell right through the portal. Blood everywhere. A part of his soul might be hanging around, but his weak little body has very much left this plane of existence.”

“Sounds like he got what was coming to him.”

Root strolls over to the other side of the counter and rests her chin in one hand, gazing at Shaw who swigs down the rest of her coffee to avoid prolonged eye contact.

“Well sure, but without him I’m just stuck here. Can’t leave the building, can’t go back from whence I came. And believe me, I’ve been trying.”

“The screaming at night,” Shaw surmises.

“That’s the portal giving me a big middle finger for my efforts. Sorry about that, for the record.”

“You want me to do something.”

Root smiles, and it dips back into that devilish look from earlier. She knows she’s been caught. “I just need a little bit of blood. Like his. Like yours.”

“You going to kill me, Root?” Shaw asks bluntly. She figured it would get to this, or something like it, and she’ll fight back of course, though she’s got no past experience to draw on in a fistfight with a literal demon. Would the tail work like a third arm, or closer to a whip? Huh.

That’s a train of thought she probably shouldn’t follow in the present circumstances.

“Of course not. In fact, this actually works in your favour. Hold on.” She holds a hand up for Shaw to stay where she is, and leaves the room. When she comes back, there’s a thick tome held in her hands, and she slides it to Shaw over the counter.

The black casing looks like it’s been beaten, buried, and thrown around over a long lifetime, patchy and torn at the edges, and the pages inside are yellow with age. Shaw doesn’t touch it, just looks over the words on the cover, which are, of course, unreadable. Probably Latin; it’s always fucking Latin.

“Carlos left some helpful notes in there, which I think you’ll appreciate. A little bloody in places, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You’re smarter than he was,” Root says, in what she probably thinks is an encouraging tone.

Shaw narrows her eyes and pushes the book away with her index finger. “How is any of this worthwhile for me?”

Like medical school isn’t giving out enough required reading without her picking up the Necronomicon in her down time.

In response, Root holds her hand up to the light for Shaw to see three overlapping cuts at the centre of her palm. The little triangle is a pale pink colour, like an old scar, and Shaw hadn’t really noticed it before. “Why do you think I was brought here? Power, Sameen, that’s what humans have always wanted. Give your life blood to the hungry, and in return you get… their favour. Three of them, in fact.”

“Three wishes?” Shaw groans at the cliché of it all. “So you’re a genie, is that it?”

“Every story has a little bit of truth to it.” Root grins, and holds up three fingers to press the point. “Just blood, and you can have whatever you want, within the confines of the three. And then,” she snaps her fingers back into a fist, “I’m gone.”

Shaw is a pragmatist, has always been, from a young and precocious age. Things you want in life aren’t dropped into your lap, not unless you’re born into that lifestyle; you put in the work, you go to school, you live in a crappy apartment with rat droppings in the walls.

And sometimes, apparently, you get to make a deal with the devil.

Wordlessly, she reaches out a hand and pulls the tome closer. She looks at Root, whose expression is glowing with open excitement, and lifts the cover away from the first page. “I’ll think about it.”

That’s pretty much all she’s giving up until she knows, first of all, how much blood is actually involved here, and secondly, how much Root’s favours (with big, dramatic, quotation marks around that word) are going to fuck up the rest of her life. Probably a lot. But the truth is, Shaw has been bored for a long time now.

Maybe a little fuck-up is exactly what she needs.


End file.
